The Best New Immigration Audiobooks To Read In 2025

In the final year of the Trump Presidency, the border was within reach of being secure as the daily arrests had dwindled to the lowest numbers in Border Patrol history. Nations south of our border that once violated our nation’s sovereignty and blatantly disrespected our nation, now adhered to our strong President who forced those nations to heel and show our great nation respect. On January 20, 2021, everything changed. President Biden has intentionally destroyed the American immigration system through the manipulation of DHS policies and laws.

Never before in American history has our nation been invaded by millions of foreigners all with the encouragement and direct assistance of the United States government. The once proud United States Border Patrol has been forced to participate in the unlawful smuggling of millions of illegal aliens to their final destinations across America. Morale within the DHS does not exist. Within the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, over 5,000,000 illegal aliens have been arrested and millions have been fraudulently released into our nation. Another 10,000,000 have absconded undetected because hundreds of miles of the southern border are open with not one single Border Patrol Agent actively patrolling. Our nation faces a crisis created by both political parties that if left to continue will destroy our nation from within. There is no greater threat to our Republic than the invasion of millions of foreigners that do not share our language, culture or our shared values and beliefs.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes readers from Washington, D.C.

, where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our "nation of immigrants" to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism.

A powerful analysis of how regulation of the movement of enslaved and free black people produced a national immigration policy in the period between the American Revolution and the end of Reconstruction. Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration, and states set their own terms for regulating the movement of immigrants, free blacks, and enslaved people.

Insisting that it was their right and their obligation to protect the public health and safety, states passed their own laws prohibiting the arrival of foreign convicts, requiring shipmasters to post bonds or pay taxes for passengers who might become public charges, ordering the deportation of immigrant paupers, quarantining passengers who carried contagious diseases, excluding or expelling free blacks, and imprisoning black sailors. To the extent that these laws affected foreigners, they comprised the immigration policy of the United States. Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy. In the century after the American Revolution, states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that, if Congress gained control over immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and the interstate slave trade. The Civil War and the abolition of slavery removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy, which was first directed at Chinese immigrants. Admission remained the norm for Europeans, but Chinese laborers were excluded through techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled that immigration authority was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while some states monitor and punish immigrants, and others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. By revealing the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, and deportation, distinguished historian Kevin Kenny sheds light on the history of race and belonging in America, as well as the ongoing tensions between state and federal authority over immigration.